Love is a many splintered thing.
Loving someone is the greatest, most complex thing humans are capable of. The fact that you can smile at the mere mention of someone's name one minute and stab their photo with a letter opener the next is a testament to how strong and how broad the range of emotions is.
Mr. & Mrs. Smith
takes this idea literally, arming an unhappily
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married couple with automatic weapons and letting them work out their differences in a bath of explosions and literal home wrecking.
John (Brad Pitt) and Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie) live a drab suburban life in a nice home. They drive nice cars and eat well, but after six years of marriage things have become stale. Marriage counseling doesn't help, but when John and Jane discover they work for rival covert agencies specializing in assassinations, the real therapy commences. Aggression and resentment built up over the years of their sham-marriage begin to dissipate out as the lovebirds bombard one another with bullets and grenades.
Director Doug Liman honed his action skills with
The Bourne Identity
but keeps the explosive content to a minimum during the early part of the film, only hinting at the violent lifestyles of his protagonists. The Mr. and Mrs. are button-down stiffs until
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their true identities are revealed. Then the life of the picture comes from the juxtaposition of deadly weapons in a suburban home. After a volatile game of cat and mouse, the crumbling couple has a "rumble in the cul-de-sac" that leaves them both bruised and battered. Out of ammunition, they fight hand to hand, beating each other against furniture, walls and even a grandfather clock. In any other movie this scene of domestic violence might have been the harrowing climax accompanied by screeching string music, but Liman thankfully keeps the mood light with Charles Wright's "Express Yourself."
Some of the best jokes-like Jane working for an all-female, Charlie's Angels-like agency run by "Father"-are made with little or no fanfare, but the consistent humor covers over the possibility of character development. The Smiths may as well be John and Jane Doe for all we know about them. They don't know each other, the audience doesn't know them and it leaves much of the film feeling cold. The running time is right at two hours, much of which is taken up by car chases and drawn out fight scenes the film could have done without. Still,
Smith
is a funny, violent look at love and marriage we can all relate to, even if we've never killed anyone.
